Off-road enthusiasts often fit their off-road vehicles with numerous accessories to enhance the vehicle's ability to traverse extreme terrain or simply to make the vehicle look more rugged. Such accessories include, for example, special tires, heavy duty bumpers, stinger bars to help prevent the vehicle from tumbling, high intensity lights, roll bars, and many others.
Stock vehicles such as Jeep® Wrangler® brand vehicles generally have air intakes that are located in the engine compartment of the vehicle and through which air is drawn into the engine to be mixed with fuel. As a consequence, dust raised during use of the stock vehicle can be ingested into the air intake, particularly when off-roading in dry sandy or dusty environments such as deserts or beaches. Perhaps more seriously, however, water can be ingested through the air intake when fording streams and rivers that are deeper than the height of the air intake or where a bow wave created by the vehicle rises above the air intake. Ingestion of water is a very serious matter as the water can make its way into the cylinders of the engine resulting in a hydrolock condition, which can ruin an engine virtually instantly.
Snorkels have long been used to raise the height at which and/or change the position where air is drawn into the engine and thereby to reduce the ingestion of dust into the air intake and to inhibit water from entering the air intake. Such snorkels are common, for example, on military and commercial vehicles and also are common accessories added to off-road vehicles by their owners. Some owners add a snorkel because they engage in extreme off-road driving while others add a snorkel because they like the rugged look it lends to a vehicle. In either case, snorkels available for off-road vehicles such as Jeep® brand vehicles have heretofore been considered unsightly by many in that much of the conduit of the snorkel leading to the air intake of the vehicle is visible on the outside of the vehicle. Furthermore, installing such snorkels has been irreparably destructive to the vehicle because most snorkel kits require that holes be drilled in a fender and/or the hood of the vehicle. Thus, if an owner wants to return the vehicle to stock condition, expensive replacement hoods and/or fenders have generally been required to replace the ones damaged when a snorkel was installed. Also, most snorkels available on the market have a fixed configuration such as, for example, a low intake configuration or a high intake configuration and once installed cannot easily be adapted from the fixed configuration to another configuration.
A need therefore exists for a snorkel system for off-road vehicles that addresses the above and other shortcomings of prior art snorkels. It is to the provision of such a snorkel system that the present invention is primarily directed.